it wasn’t me

Go Fish

But we gotta do it for that awesome cool fish feast you get from the guild achievement That’s a Lot of Bait. We have 4.3k! Almost halfway, guys! And in the meantime, our raid leadership has decided that 60 stat foods are not enough for raiding and we need to bring our own 90 stat foods.

Most of which come from fishing.

Even worse, some of the important ones — Deepsea Sagefish, e.g. — don’t actually have pools.

Cue the QQ.

I actually like fishing. It’s relaxing for me, it’s calming; sometimes I do it after a particularly stressful raid, sometimes after a bad RL day. I find it somewhat thought-provoking, actually.

It happens during my sudoku puzzles, too. I’ll be in the middle of a puzzle and suddenly five or six ideas come out of nowhere and need to be written down right now.

I started to write two posts, but then it came easily at the end of this one, and there’s not much to say about how to enjoy fishing. It seems either you will or you won’t be able to find something to help with your boredom. So YAY TEXTWALLS. >.>

El’s Anglin’ has very good tutorials and explanations of the ins and outs of fishing, from the mundane to min/maxing fishing efficiencies. Here’s a brief overview (LOL) for fishing for raiding:

Fishing Skill |There’s a fishing daily in Stormwind or Orgrimmar that rewards fishing skill (+1 or +2) just like the cooking daily rewards cooking skill. You can increase your fishing skill with lures or even items (Mastercraft Kalu’ak Fishing Pole = +50 fishing, e.g.). Fishing skill is otherwise increased by number of casts. Anywhere counts, so yes, if you wanted to, you could level your fishing 1-525 in Stormwind alone. You can’t fish in combat, so spots away from aggroable mobs is preferable. You also can’t fish while swimming, so be careful how far you wade in, or else use some sort of water walking (or Levitate, etc.).

Cooking Recipes |The Cata recipes are sold by the cooking daily vendor in either Stormwind or Orgrimmar. I’d advise picking up your own favored stats before picking up others. They generally sell for 3 Chef’s Awards a piece, sometimes 5. The guild achiev-earned recipes are sold from the guild vendor.

Pools |Pools are those circles in the water. Pools count for the guild feast achiev; even better, it can be any pool, not just Cata fish. Even better, there are pools that don’t contain fish but still count for the achiev (like Pools of Fire). Pools do not require a high skill in Fishing; you can fish pools with skill 1. You can usually get about 4-5 catches from a pool. You have a better chance of getting an actual, usable fish from a pool than from open water.

Open Water | You can fish it just about anywhere there’s water. No one can really “ninja” your catches because…it’s open. You can always catch something from open water (no longer requires a certain skill to be able to fish there), but there is a certain “no junk” skill. About half your catch will either be junk (if your skill isn’t high enough) or useless fish (like Murglesnout).

Inland vs. Coastal | This should be obvious: inland pools and fish are more in the middle of maps, and coastal pools and fish are along the coasts. Duh. But I’ll refer to them below as (I) inland and (C) coastal.

Fishing By Zones

Fishing is essentially farming. Minimal movement makes for efficient farming. Since you’ll have to travel (by mount) to hunt for pools, generally sticking in the same zone is what I do. So I’ve grouped things by what you get out of each zone. Some of the zones are also particularly efficient for farming the non-fish 90 stat foods alongside the fishable ones.

After dividing by zone I divided it by materials making which foods, then pools and open water. This way the people for are fishing purely for the achiev (pools) can go do that, and people who are fishing for particular fish can do that.

Some of the items listed below are 60 stat foods — I include them because they are fishable from pools and thus contribute to the guild achiev. SMF stands for Seafood Magnifique Feast (90 useful stat feast); fish marked with this are materials for that achiev feast. BDF stands for Broiled Dragon Feast (60 useful stat feast) in the same manner. x4=SMF means you need 4 of this for 1 SMF; likewise x6=BDF is you need 6 flanks for 1 BDF. Everything else is a 1 raw fish:1 stat food ratio.

Vashj’ir

You can’t really fish in Vashj’ir. Sure, I think there is technically land above Vashj’ir somewhere and you could go up there.

Killing some fish in the Shimmering Expanse have a small chance to reward you with Deepsea Sagefish, but you’d catch far more and faster by fishing elsewhere than trying to kill everything.

The water is particularly located in the eastern part of Deepholm, both north (near the Therazane Fungal dailies) and south (near the Horde shipwreck). I would go for the southern part if you’re purely out to fish, since the northern Fungal Daily area is swarming with mobs around the banks.

The southern part (Silvermarsh) has the advantage of being rather vacant but also near the Basilisks and Dragons. Basilisks and Dragons also run around near the jump-on-rocks-dragon-daily in NW Deepholm, but the southern ones (Storm’s Fury Wreckage) are lower level and thus easier to farm.

Lavascale Catfish are the particularly valuable fish from this zone, but Deepholm is not my main choice for fishing up Lavascale Catfish.

Like Deepholm, there’s no coast in Mount Hyjal. The obvious place to fish from plain water is right there next to Nordrassil, spreading across the north until you get to the lake just south of the Shrine of Aessina. There’s also a bunch of Trout pools near the Gates of Sothann and especially next to Doom’s Vigil and down the waterfall before you hit Azshara.

The main fishing venue in Hyjal is the lava pit around Sulfuron Spire. Here you can find a Pool of Fire, from which you can fish 1-2 Volatile Fire per catch. You fish up mostly junk from the open lava, but there’s a couple pools that spawn there.

The level 80 birds around the Shrine of Aviana make for excellent sources of Delicate Wings, despite having a lower droprate than the vultures in Uldum.

I’ve not fished on the actual PvP part of Tol Barad, but there’s plenty of pools lighting up my minimap on the PvE daily side.

You can also do dailies slowly in some places — Rustberg Village, the edges of Darkwood, back by the cannons in the shipbuilding place — while also fishing, because of quick and close mob respawns. Most of the time it’s a Fathom Eel pool, but every once in a while you find the Cataclysm debris wreckage pool: Shipwreck Debris.

Like most debris pools, you can get a crate of stuff from this pool, and I’ve found it’s usually only 1-2 casts before the pool disappears. I’ve gotten gold, cloth (half a stack!), ore (5 Obsidium Ore once), and herbs (1-2 Azshara’s Veil) so far from this crate. Sometimes I see a Shipwreck Debris while out doing the dailies with guildies and will run off just to fish it.

I don’t like to fish in the Twilands mainly because there’s so many people already in this zone either questing or farming something else nearby. There are Pools of Fire down around Lord Cannon’s pool, but combined with the Fire Elementals that hang around there, it’s a popular spot to farm Volatile Fire. I’ve never really found a time yet on my server when somebody else wasn’t also farming the pools with me.

The pool of choice is the Highland Guppy (inland), for future fish feasts or for the cheapo intellect stat food. Fishing around the ports for each faction (Horde around Dragonmaw Post & Alliance around Highbank) is especially productive for coastal fishing since there are both vendors (for selling junk) and portals to main cities.

Oh, Uldum. Everyone hates you this month because of your discontinuity with the Azerothian universe (and your ridiculous amount of cutscenes). But know that I love you when it comes to fishing.

The Delicate Wings can be farmed off the vultures down near Azeroth’s Nazis. But I would rather go to Hyjal than try to pick out these continuously circling mobs.

Mudfish and Eels are the two pools in Uldum; inland and coastal, respectively. Eel pools require mounting to go hunting for, because they’re spread out along the east coast and down around the south. Sometimes it takes a few looks around a pool to find where to land, especially in the south on the cliffs. Mudfish pools are close enough together that you might just as well walk it. Plus, crocolisks line the inland banks, all the way up and down, which should make melee DPS chefs happy.

Open water fishing is the beauty of Uldum. Whether you’re tired of mounting up to the next pool or you want a special fish, you can just fish in open water. Open water is amazing because no one can “steal” your supply of fish like they can with pools.

There’s a tiny drawback with fishing skill related to junk drops in open water. I (525 skill) normally go fishing with my Mastercraft Kalu’ak Fishing Pole (+30 skill) & the Weather Beaten Fishing Hat’s lure (+75) to reduce my junk drops, since Uldum has a particularly high no-junk skill (650). While I stay at no-junk skill, it takes me on average 20 minutes to get a stack (20) of Deepsea Sagefish.

So an hour’s worth of fishing for Deepsea Sagefish for my guild results in (on average) enough food for two people in a raid. My own personal supply that I bring with me is two stacks of food (good for 40 attempts), but I’ve found 20-30 attempts is what we average per raid night. So when I go fishing for an hour I shoot for a stack and half each of +90 Int & +90 Spirit, since I can cook both. I still need to grab the other Blackbelly recipe before I can do the same gig inland.

An Hour? Of Fishing? Are You Crazy?

Maybe. I think the crazy part is I donate these fish to my guild for free rather than selling them on the AH and making a fortune.

So, yes, I’m crazy.

While fishing for an hour is apparently hard for most people — like my guildies — I think the secret lies in that I’m not just fishing whenever I fish. Quite often I’m listening to something — a podcast, for example. The Twisted Nether Blogcast is on average 2 hours long. The Matticast (recently picked up; love it!) goes for about an hour. Or a movie — 2 hours? 3 hours maybe. (Lord of the Rings: Extended Version nets you 4 hours, three times.) A TV show is 40-45 min per episode if you watch it off the season DVD set; an hour if you pick it up from a source with commercials.

I also like to write blog posts in between casts and cooking stacks. Like this post. Parts of it were written while cooking a bunch of Sagefish up. Considering I don’t have dual monitors, perhaps you think I am an Elite Alt-Tabber. Not really, I just listen for the bobber sound to pop (turn up Sounds under the game volume settings for it). Provided it’s not at the very end of the cast (I’ve usually alt-tabbed by that point, though), you still have a bit of time to right click the bobber after it splashes.

Sometimes I listen to music — off Youtube, off my own iPod supply, off the in-game music — while fishing. If you’re into classical music (even modern classical music), Adagios are great for relaxing fishing. Or even just listening to the water wave back and forth via the in-game sounds (turn your Ambience up for it) can be meditative. Perhaps that sounds a bit New Agey, but it’s probably my number-two cool down for after raids. (Number one is walking away from the computer for a while.) It’s my number-one getcha-game-face-on for before raids (it calms me, and focuses out all the crazy conscious things I’m worried about).

If you’re not ever going to do anything else but just fishing, then yes, fishing is godawful boring past the tenth catch. And if you manage to just fish for an hour or more without going nuts or running off for something else, then I salute you, you crazy person you.

…And that’s my thoughts on fishing. I hope it helps you in your fishing expeditions, whether that for the achiev or for your own supplies. May all your pools be plentiful!

Like this:

Related

Post navigation

10 thoughts on “Go Fish”

This is an amazing information resource you’ve compiled here, definitely bookmarking! As someone who’s been leveling his DK’s fishing from skill 1 entirely in Cataclysm pools, I usually break out the fishing rod while listening to podcasts or just waiting for DPS queues. I keep hoping to get the turtle, but no luck so far.

I personally love Twilight Highlands, as I am able to fish right out on the ocean or up in big cultist-area lake with Path of Frost and avoid all enemy conflict. And there’s a TON of Highland Guppy pools!

One thing you may want to add to your list is Tol Barad. You can fish up Fathom Eels there from both coastal and inland river pools, and there are also shipwreck debris (name might be slightly different) pools where you can get crates containing some nice stuff…Cata herbs/ore/cloth, etc. Again, I’m a little spoiled because I just trot out to sea and fish undisturbed, so I’m not sure how much of a pain it is for non water-walking classes.

El’s Anglin’ has both Twilands & Uldum having 30% open water catch of Deepsea Sagefish from open coastal water, so it doesn’t numerically matter for the Sagefish, I think. It’s more an opinion on the other fish you get from the open coastal water of the zone.

Uldum’s open coastal water results in four catches: Murglesnout, Deepsea Sagefish, Fathom Eel, or Volatile Water. Twilands, on the other hand, has these open coastal water catches: Murglesnout, Deepsea Sagefish, Algaefin Rockfish, and Volatile Water. So it’s a toss-up as to whether you find 90 Agi food (Eel) or 90 crit food (Rockfish) more useful to you, your alts, or your guild.

Personally, I find 90 Agi more appealing; thus, I fish in Uldum.

Edit: Fathom Eel are also used in the uber fish feast, so if your guild has achieved that, I would definitely recommend Uldum over Twilands.

[…] for my guild, and I wrote a blog post before I joined WoW Insider about the pools one could fish for the guild achievement while still being buff-food productive. So it's no wonder I'm really psyched about farming. My own […]